Crafty Homeschool & Hands-on Learning
March is National Craft Month, and it is the perfect time to incorporate more crafting projects into your hands-on homeschool. Aside from being a key component of many kinesthetic learning activities, crafting provides an outlet for creativity and stress relief in crafters of all ages, and creates an ideal situation for introducing and reinforcing fine motor, problem-solving, social, and organizational skills. Check out this Homeschool Living for some great tips and ideas for crafty homeschool activities, and most importantly the reasons for using crafts in hands-on learning for students of all ages and abilities.
Mastering your Crafts
Hands-on learning is a crucial component of early childhood education–so crucial, in fact, that it should be prioritized even to the point of excluding formal, structured education in early learning. Allowing children to explore and learn naturally, through hands-on activities and play, is critical if you want to cultivate and build on an enthusiasm for learning for years to come. This article, “Let Children Play,” shares the results of a new study which challenges the widely-accepted idea that early education in the form of formal instruction is beneficial to children.
While there are thousands of ways to incorporate educational crafting into your hands-on homeschool activities–using them to teach subjects from math and science to history and literature–a sometimes overlooked aspect of hands-on learning is the benefit of teaching artistry and crafting skills in and of themselves. Arts and crafts projects, on their own, promote decision making and problem-solving skills and help children practice independence and creativity–and that’s all before you start coordinating these projects to teach other subjects!
Crafty Learning
Have you been overwhelmed by searching for ideas for hands-on activities for your homeschool? When you have access to millions of ideas in a few seconds, how can you possibly start to narrow them down? Start small. This geo flower STEAM craft is the perfect simple, inexpensive, crafty homeschool activity. A few pins or small nails, some old styrofoam (or anything else you can stick the pins in) and multi-colored loom bands or thread are all you need to bring this hands-on STEAM craft to life in your homeschool.
Pantry staples, cotton swabs, and construction paper have never been as fascinating as they are in these 40 educational crafts for kids, introducing coding, biology, geography, literature, art, astronomy, geometry, and much, much more!
